Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness (PSP)

An "afternoon" that could spend months in your PSP.
2/1/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 2

Away from the combat, things are just as challenging. Leveling up and upgrading your gear isn't your traditional cloth-to-leather-to-chainmail deal. There's a good amount of micro-management involved with outfitting your crew intelligently. Thankfully, the merchants that you deal with appreciate your business. Spending more money increases your popularity with them, and eventually, they offer you special items that you wouldn't have had the opportunity to purchase otherwise. Just another cool twist.

But even assembling your crew takes some thinking. Instead of just stumbling into a character in your travels and adding him or her to your party, you can create the members of your own party. Need more brute strength? Create a brawler. Need a healer? Create a cleric. Again, there's a lot of planning and micro-management involved, as each character's strength depends on the amount of mana you have to spend during creation.

Despite the incredible amount of detail involved in just about every aspect of the game -- and I've only touched on some of the major ones -- you can play through the entire thing without getting too deep into the minutia. You'll still need to nail down the basics, but you could blaze through Afternoon of Darkness in a few dozen hours. On the other hand, if you really dug the thing and have somewhat of an obsessive personality, you could spend the rest of your natural life leveling up and re-tweaking your party.

And that's just the port of the original game. New to the PSP version is an alternate storyline that can be unlocked by beating the game. Here, you play as Etna, who becomes the game's lead after her initial attempts at awakening Laharl with all those fancy weapons actually ends up killing him. Whoops. Also new to the handheld game is some multiplay capability. Ad hoc, you can battle a buddy or share your gear with him or her. In a perfect world, multiplay would be full infrastructure mode. Hopefully when Cursed Memories gets squished down to handheld size, that's what we'll have.

If you're an RPG fan, you have very little reason not to pick up Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness. Even if you've played through the original PS2 game, the bonus storyline should be enough to sway you. If you haven't played the original -- or its sequel -- be prepared to deal with somewhat of a learning curve, but your efforts will be worth it. Some quality RPG titles have finally started to show up for the PSP, and this might be the best of them.

This review was based on a retail version of Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness that was purchased by the reviewer with money that he earned by doing numerous turn-based dungeon-clearing quests.